A
National Project with Many Workers

John A. Lomax was head of the Archive
of American Folk-Song (1932 – 42) but spent most of his
time away from Washington, often in the field. Sumter County,
Alabama, which lies along the southwest border of the state,
proved to be one of Lomax's most fertile collecting locations.
During his trip there, October – November 1940, accompanied
by his wife, Ruby Terrill Lomax and Mrs. Ruby Pickens Tartt
of the Alabama Federal Writer's Project, Lomax recorded Rich
Brown singing eleven songs, many of them spirituals.

In 1928, when the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, invited
Robert W. Gordon to become "specialist and consultant in the
field of Folk Song and Literature," Gordon had already conceived
and launched his lifetime mission to collect the entire body of
American folk music. He called it a "national project with
many workers." Gordon attended Harvard University between
1906 and 1917, and then left in order to devote all his free time
to this collecting enterprise. Supporting himself through teaching,
writing, and the occasional grant, Gordon traveled from the waterfronts
of Oakland and San Francisco, California, to Asheville, North Carolina,
and Darien, Georgia, collecting and recording folksongs with his
Edison wax-cylinder machine. He wrote a monthly column in Adventure
magazine, "Old Songs That Men Have Sung," asking readers
to send in copies of all the folksongs they could remember. And
he contacted Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division at the Library
of Congress, to discuss his dream and seek institutional support.

Engel believed that American grassroots traditions should be
represented in the national library, and wrote in The Annual
Report of the Librarian of Congress for 1928:

There is a pressing need for the formation of a great centralized
collection of American folk-songs. The logical place for such
a collection is the national library of the United States.
This collection should comprise all the poems and melodies
that have sprung from our soil or have been transplanted here,
and have been handed down, often with manifold changes, from
generation to generation as a precious possession of our folk.

Countless individuals, numerous walks of life, several races
have contributed to this treasure of songs and ballads. It
is richer than that of any other country. Too much of it has
remained scattered or unrecorded. The preservation of this
material in the remote haunts where it still flourishes is
endangered by the spread of the radio and phonograph, which
are diverting the attention of the people from their old heritage
and are making them less dependent on it.

Alan Lomax is best known as a folksong
collector, but during his tenure at the Library of Congress
he also worked the lecture circuit, gave concerts, and made
recordings. This is a publicity photo for his work with the
Columbia Lecture Bureau in 1940. His association with the bureau
probably derived from his radio series Columbia's School
of the Air. The Lecture Bureau said of Alan Lomax, "With
his records and his guitar he brings his listeners closer to
America, the real America . . . close to the singing country
that he believes America to be."

The Library of Congress is vitally interested in the collecting
of these folk verses and folk melodies. The collecting must be
done in a scholarly manner and the collection, safeguarded against
improper use, should be made freely accessible to scholars.

Robert Gordon was not the first to use the latest technology to
document our national traditional culture, nor Carl Engel the first
to acknowledge its importance. Thomas A. Edison invented the wax-cylinder
recording machine in 1877, and it became available commercially
about 1888. The machine facilitated documentary work by many private
individuals, as well as those employed by government agencies and
public museums. These ethnographers shared a common vision. They
believed that the history of the American nation ought to include
the many voices of its diverse population, a notion that later
figured in the creation of the American Folklife Center. They believed
that sound — both song and spoken word — was a vital part
of the historical, cultural record.

Harvard anthropologist Jesse
Walter Fewkes was the first to use the Edison cylinder machine
for ethnographic research. Field recordings made on wax cylinders
could be brought back to a studio for study, and Fewkes used Edison’s
machine in Maine, in 1890, to record the songs and stories of Passamaquoddy
Indians. These wax cylinder recordings, the first ethnographic
recordings extant, are in the collections of the Archive of Folk
Culture. Between 1907 and the early 1940s, Frances Densmore collected
more than twenty-five hundred recordings from members of forty
tribes. She was one of a number of pioneering women in the field
of ethnographic documentation (including Alice Cunningham Fletcher,
Helen Heffron Roberts, and Laura Bolton) whose collections are
now in the Archive of Folk Culture.

Herbert Halpert was one of the
many folklorists of his generation to profit from the Library
of Congress's Equipment Loan Program. Halpert's work was also
supported through contracts with the Library and other federal
agencies, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA)
during the Great Depression. He traveled throughout the southern
United States, amassing more than four hundred discs of songs
and music.

The
Archive of Folk Culture

When the Archive of American Folk-Song was first established
in the Music Division, it was funded from private sources. Periodic
disagreements over his methods erupted between Robert Gordon and
Library of Congress officials during his tenure as head, and the
private money that Carl Engel had secured to fund Gordon’s
position eventually came to an end. But the idea of a national
folk archive had taken root, and it was revived when John A. Lomax
came to the Library in 1932. Lomax too was devoted to collecting
American folksong, and the decade-long association of John A. Lomax
and his son, Alan, with the Library of Congress established the
documentation of traditional culture as an important and integral
activity of the institution.

Alan Lomax became the Folk Archive’s first federally funded
staff member in 1936, and served as “assistant in charge.” He
made collecting expeditions for the Library throughout the South,
in the Midwest, and in New England; produced a seminal series of
documentary folk music albums entitled Folk Music of the United
States; conducted interviews with performers, such as Jelly Roll
Morton; and, over the years, introduced audiences in Washington,
D.C., and radio listeners nationwide to an array of traditional
artists.

An arrangement with the Library initiated by John A. Lomax, wherein
he would “give to the Library, in return for the use of a
recording machine, any records that he might obtain with it” (Report
of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30,
1933), facilitated his own collecting activities and launched
a documentary equipment-loan program that has lasted for seventy
years. Using successive types of equipment from the Library, as
recording technologies evolved from cylinder to disc to tape, collectors
such as Vance Randolph, Charles Todd, Robert Sonkin, Eloise Hubbard
Linscott, Zora Neale Hurston, Herbert Halpert,William Fenton, Melville
Herskovits, Helen Hartness Flanders, Austin Fife, and many others
were able to pursue their personal collecting activities and, at
the same time, contribute to the national collection.

Heads
of the Archive of Folk Culture

Robert W. Gordon (1928 – 32)

John A Lomax (1933 – 42, keeping the title "honorary
curator" until his death in 1948)

Alan Lomax (1937 – 42 with the title "assistant
in charge")

Benjamin A. Botkin (1942 – 45)

Duncan Emrich (1945 – 55, with the title "chief
of the Folklore Section")

Rae Korson (1956 – 69)

Alan Jabbour (1969 – 74)

Joseph C. Hickerson (1974 – 88)

Alan Jabbour (1988 – 99, as director of the
American Folklife Center)

Peggy Bulger (1999 – 2002, as director of the
American Folklife Center)

Michael Taft (2002 – 2012 )

Nicole Saylor (2012 – )

The strategy of lending equipment and recording supplies to a
network of regional collectors was enormously productive, both
in building the collection and in creating a community of folklorists
with ties to the Library.

The desire to distribute the Folk Archive’s holdings for
public and educational uses led to the creation of the Library’s
Recording Laboratory, which produced the first releases in the
Folk Music of the United States series in 1942. In the 1950s, the
early 78-rpm albums were converted to 33-rpm, and new LP releases
appeared through the early 1980s. As new technologies developed
for making field recordings — wax cylinder, disc, wire, tape,
and so forth — the laboratory staff acquired machines, developed
expertise, and initiated publishing projects to make available
to the public traditional music that was thought at the time to
have no commercial value. It was also necessary for the laboratory
to buy and maintain recording equipment associated with each succeeding
technology. In the 1990s, CD versions of many of these early recordings,
as well as new releases from the world music collections, were
produced and distributed through cooperative agreements with commercial
recording companies.

The expertise developed by the Recording Laboratory, the equipment-loan
program, and the growing reputation of the Library of Congress
as a repository for ethnographic documentation were appealing to
folklorists and cultural documentarians working in this country
and in foreign lands as well. Library of Congress collections are
international in scope, and Library officials supported an international
acquisition policy for the Folk Archive. A recording trip to the
Bahamas that Alan Lomax made in 1935, during his tenure at the
Library, may have been the first instance of seeking folklife materials
from outside the United States. The Folk Archive now holds material
from nearly every region in the world.

Henrietta Yurchenco began doing
fieldwork in 1942 in Mexico and Guatemala, where she recorded
traditional music in Indian communities. On a 1970 visit to
St. John's Island, South Carolina, Professor Yurchenco brought
some of her undergraduate students from the City College of
New York to help record music during spring recess. There,
the students experienced first-hand the civil rights movement
as it was taking place at a church that was spearheading a
drive to register black voters. The Reverend Goodwin preached
an impassioned Easter Sunday sermon on civil rights at Zion
Methodist Church that weekend.

During the 1940s and 1950s,
for example, Arthur S. Alberts made remarkable recordings of West
African music, from a dozen ethnic groups and six different colonial
territories, all of which he contributed to the Library of Congress
during the tenure of archive head Duncan Emrich. When portions
of this collection were made available commercially, they did much
to counter stereotypical notions about the “Dark Continent” by
presenting examples of authentic cultural expressions. During her
long career, anthropologist Henrietta Yurchenco has documented
the traditions of African Americans on John’s Island, South
Carolina, and in Puerto Rico. She has also conducted fieldwork
in Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, Morocco, and Ireland. Like many such
collectors of international folklife materials, Yurchenco has made
periodic donations to the Library of Congress.

The Folk Archive also received an infusion of material when John
A. Lomax, Benjamin A. Botkin (who followed Alan Lomax as head of
the archive), and others associated with the Folk Archive participated
in New Deal-era programs such as the Federal Writers’ Project.
During the 1930s, hundreds of federal workers were employed in
cultural projects around the country, including the Ex-Slave Narrative
Project and the California Folk Music Project. When the Work Projects
Administration (WPA) offices finally closed down, in response to
a shifting of emphasis to national defense as the United States
entered the Second World War, Library of Congress officials facilitated
the transfer of cultural materials collected by its various agencies
to the Library.

Thus, by the 1940s, the Archive
of American Folk-Song had expanded its documentary scope to include
folklore, verbal arts, and oral history. In addition to his work
as “assistant in charge” at the archive, Alan Lomax
was hosting and producing programs for the CBS School of the
Air in New York City, and participating in the Rockefeller
Foundation-funded Radio Research Project at the Library of Congress.
One activity of the project was to conduct recorded interviews
that sampled public opinion from around the country, and the day
after the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, Lomax put out
a call for folklorists to collect “man on the street” reactions
to the event. Sixty years later, the American Folklife Center followed
Lomax’s example by asking folklorists from across the nation
to document immediate public reactions to the tragic events of
September 11, 2001.

With national energies focused on the Second World War, folklife
collecting activities slowed, but successive Folk Archive heads
continued the policies and practices established by the Lomaxes — lending
documentation equipment and supplies, publishing materials from
the collections, and encouraging donations of material from this
country and around the world. Benjamin A. Botkin helped to redefine
and broaden the purview of folklore research to include ethnic
studies and cultural traditions found in urban settings. He also
encouraged folklorists to become involved in public performances
and presentations by traditional artists. He is best known for
his many popular anthologies, such as the Treasury of American
Folklore (1944) and Lay My Burden Down (1945), which
draws on the Folk Archive’s recordings of ex-slave narratives.

In 1948, Vermont folksong collector
Helen Hartness Flanders, wife of Vermont senator Ralph Flanders,
presented a lecture and concert of New England ballads, sung
by three folk singers in the Coolidge Auditorium. The singers
are: (front row, left to right) Charles Finnemore (from Maine),
Elmer George, and Asa Davis (both from Vermont). Behind them,
standing, are Charles Spivacke, chief of the Music Division;
Helen Hartness Flanders; and Duncan Emerich, chief of the Folklore
Section. Alan Lomax, with whom Flanders consulted regarding
her own collecting efforts in Vermont, staged the first folk
music program at the Library in 1940.

Duncan Emrich was another
Harvard-trained folklorist and historian (like Robert Gordon, John
Lomax, and Benjamin Botkin) who advanced Folk Archive acquisition
efforts. The growing reputation of the archive following World
War II resulted in a flood of requests for reference information
and services, both from private individuals and from radio, motion
picture, and publishing firms. Emrich argued vigorously for a larger
staff to help respond to the many demands of acquisition, processing,
and reference. The Library failed to hire additional staff but
did name Emrich chief of a Folklore Section created within the
Music Division. (The unit was abandoned after Emrich’s departure.)
Emrich developed a visionary four-year plan for acquiring recordings
from twelve states whose traditional culture was not represented
in the archive, with a particular interest in the narrative, in
occupational culture, and in materials from urban areas and minority
language groups. He also proposed documenting traditional performers
from foreign lands, such as Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and Australia.
To facilitate his plan, Emrich visited twenty-one colleges and
universities around the country to initiate a network of university-based
documentary programs and to urge the creation of state folklore
archives.

A new generation of regional collectors was at work following
World War II. Wayland Hand was working among the miners in Butte,
Montana; Arthur Campa, collecting Hispanic songs in New Mexico;
and Thelma James, recording among the minority communities in Detroit.
The Archive of Folk Culture profited from all this effort, and
collections eventually arrived at the Library, on the new documentary
medium of tape, from Anne Grimes (Ohio folksongs), Ray B. Browne
(Alabama folklife), Sherman Lee Pompey (folksongs and folklore
from the Ozarks), Joseph S. Hall (folklife from the Smokey Mountains
of Tennessee), Harry Oster (Iowa and Louisiana cultural traditions),
and Alan Jabbour (fiddling traditions, featuring the legendary
Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia).

In the Library’s annual report for 1950, halfway through
his tenure as head, Duncan Emrich reported that the number of discs
in the collection had reached ten thousand, and that henceforth
the medium of choice for the documentation of sound would be tape
recordings. Significantly, he reported to the Librarian, Luther
Evans:

It is possible to say, in 1950, that the pioneering phase
of field collecting and the establishment of Archives has come
to a close and that in the future emphasis should be directed
to coordinated efforts, to elimination of duplication, and
to strong encouragement for scholars and others to use — in
fairly exhaustive studies — the materials already gathered.

Mississippi John Hurt made a number
of commercial recordings in 1928, but farmed for a living,
never pursuing music professionally. In the early 1960s, a
fan of Hurt's music contacted him and convinced him to travel to
Washington and record for the Library of Congress.

In 1955, when Emrich resigned his position, his assistant, Rae
Korson, was named head of the Folk Archive. Her husband, folklorist
George Korson, documented songs and lore of Pennsylvania coal miners,
and that work is included in the archive today. Rae Korson had
served as assistant and reference librarian to Lomax and Botkin,
as well as to Emrich. In her new position, she stressed the importance
of maintenance and preservation of the vast holdings that had accumulated,
an emphasis that was consistent with the policies of L. Quincy
Mumford, then Librarian of Congress. She was particularly interested
in improving reference service and publishing additional recordings
from the Folk Archive. In 1963, Korson hired Joseph C. Hickerson
(to take the place of reference librarian Donald Leavitt) and Pat
Markland (to fill a new position as secretary), bringing the staff
to three. Hickerson himself would later become head of what was
by then called the Archive of Folk Song.

Alan Jabbour followed Korson
as head (1969-74). He had both strong academic credentials and
fieldwork experience, and in keeping with his own interests as
a folksong collector he resumed the practice of making field expeditions.
With Carl Fleischhauer, he conducted a field project in West Virginia,
from 1970 to 1972, to study the expressive traditions of the Hammons
family of Pocahontas County, and this effort resulted in a boxed-set
of two-LP recordings (1973) consisting of music, song, storytelling,
and oral history. In addition, Jabbour traveled to various places
in pursuit of important collections, and he acquired significant
holdings in Native American traditional culture, including a small
collection of early cylinders from the Peabody Museum of Harvard
University, among them Jesse Walter Fewkes’s 1890 recordings
of Passamaquoddy Indians. In 1972, Jabbour also acquired a large
and important collection documenting songs, ballads, and folk plays
of the British Isles from the American folklorist James Madison
Carpenter, an effort inspired by a letter he discovered in the
Folk Archive from Carpenter to Alan Lomax. The elderly Carpenter
had disappeared from the scene twenty years earlier, but through
the Harvard University Alumni Association Jabbour was able to track
him to his home in Booneville, Mississippi, and purchase the collection
for the archive.

The 1950s and 1960s spawned a folksong revival in the United
States that included the release of commercial recordings from
many popular performers and groups, a proliferation of coffeehouse “folksingers,” and
spontaneous hootenannies everywhere. The Folk Archive both nourished
and profited from this renewed interest and the new popularity
of music with traditional roots. The collections were a resource
for performers of many sorts seeking examples of traditional musical
performance, and the Folk Archive gained attention that brought
in new collections.

In 1974 Alan Jabbour moved to the National Endowment for the
Arts to direct its newly created Folk Arts Program, and Joseph
C. Hickerson became head of the Folk Archive. Hickerson did much
to argue the case for the importance of documenting and collecting
material from the folksong revival. Folk festivals were enormously
popular during the 1970s, and Hickerson encouraged donations of
material documenting the movement. Under Hickerson’s leadership,
special emphasis was placed on the organization and cataloging
of the archive’s collections, the creation of listening tapes
to facilitate the study of the holdings by visiting scholars, and
the further production and dissemination of recordings. Between
1974 and 1976, as part of its American Revolution Bicentennial
program, the Library of Congress issued the first five albums in
a new fifteen-album series Folk Music of America, with a grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For its cultural surveys and field
projects, the American Folklife Center formed teams of field-workers,
led by one or more members of its own staff but also including
cultural specialists from the local area and from other parts
of the country. The South-Central Georgia project was initiated
by the Arts Experiment Station Abraham Baldwin Agricultural
College and conducted in cooperation with local arts and governmental
agencies.

The American Folklife Center

During the decade preceding the establishment of the American
Folklife Center in 1976, a number of factors conjoined to bring
about the legislation that created it. In 1967 the Smithsonian
Festival of American Folklife was held for the first time on the
National Mall, bringing a wide range of traditional artists to
Washington and winning enthusiastic congressional support. About
the same time, the approaching American Revolution Bicentennial
stimulated a reexamination of pluralism in American life. A number
of dedicated people, notably folklorist and labor historian Archie
Green, walked the halls of Congress to lobby for congressional
recognition of the importance of regional and ethnic cultures.
Many cultural specialists believed the time was right for a national
center devoted to the preservation and study of folklife.

The American Folklife Preservation Act, Public Law 94-201, which
resulted from these efforts, defines the term “American folklife” as “the
traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups
in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious,
regional.” It states that “the diversity inherent in
American folklife has contributed greatly to the cultural richness
of the Nation and has fostered a sense of individuality and identity
among the American people.”

The American Folklife Preservation Act was approved by both houses
of Congress at the end of 1975, and signed into law by President
Gerald Ford on January 2, 1976. The legislation created an American
Folklife Center and charged the new organization to “preserve
and present American folklife.” Initially intended for the
Smithsonian Institution, the center was placed in the Library of
Congress, in part to build upon the work of the Folk Archive already
there.

The Folklife Center operates under the supervision of the Librarian
of Congress and a board of trustees composed of individuals from
private life appointed by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives,
the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the Librarian of Congress;
officials from federal agencies with cultural programs, appointed
by the president of the United States; and ex officio members — the
Librarian of Congress, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution,
the chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the director of the American Folklife
Center, and the presidents of the Society for Ethnomusicology and
the American Folklore Society.

The Folklife Center’s enabling legislation directs it to “preserve
and present American folklife” through programs of research,
scholarship, training, live performances, exhibits, publications,
and preservation. The legislation also calls for the establishment
and maintenance of a national archive “with any Federal department,
agency, or institution.” But, of course, a folk archive was
near at hand, and the Archive of Folk Culture was transferred from
the Music Division to the center in 1978. Thus, the traditional
archival activities of acquisition, processing, preservation, and
reference have remained central to the mission and the daily life
of the American Folklife Center.

The popularity of a concert on the
Neptune Plaza, in front of the Library's Thomas Jefferson Building,
presented on September 23, 1976, led to the creation of an
annual series, inaugurated the following year. Over the years,
the Neptune Plaza Concert Series has entertained and enlightened
audiences with a diverse assortment of traditional music and
dance from this country and around the world.

The Neptune Plaza Concert Series
ended in 1995. The current concert series, Homegrown, presents
performances by artists from the US states, trusts, and territories.
The Folklife Center also sponsors a lecture series, symposia,
and other events.

In September 1976, Alan Jabbour,
who had served earlier as head of the Folk Archive, became the
first director of the American Folklife Center. In 1977, the first
full year of its operations, the center launched two field documentary
projects, the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project and the South-Central
Georgia Folklife Project, setting a pattern that came to characterize
much of its early work. One project was urban and one rural, but
both emphasized the importance of documenting artistic traditions
professionally, using both sound recordings and still photography,
with an eye both to creating public products such as books and
exhibitions and to building the collections in the Folk Archive.
Teams of center field-workers sought to document not only music
but also verbal arts, material culture, and occupational traditions,
as well as other aspects of culture.

The creation of the American Folklife Center also engaged the
U.S. Congress in the folklore enterprise. Whereas most Folk Archive
collections had resulted from the vision and interest of individuals — both
private citizens and those working for government agencies and
large public institutions — many of the center’s field
documentary projects were now carried out in cooperation with the
National Park Service, often at the behest of a member (or members)
of Congress. The center has worked with the Park Service on cultural
heritage surveys in northern Maine; Lowell, Massachusetts; the
New Jersey Pine Barrens and Paterson, New Jersey; along the Blue
Ridge Parkway, in Virginia and North Carolina; and at New River
Gorge, in West Virginia.

In 1979, the Folklife Center launched the Federal Cylinder Project,
one of its most ambitious undertakings. Over the decades, the Folk
Archive had received thousands of original, one-of-a-kind wax-cylinder
recordings of ethnographic material from field documentation conducted
from1890 through the 1930s, primarily of American Indian music.
The Library's Recording Laboratory had developed a special expertise
in the technically challenging work of copying these recordings.
In the 1930s and 1940s, some were copied onto disc, and beginning
in the 1960s others were copied onto magnetic tape. Now a commitment
was made to copy all of the more than ten-thousand wax cylinders
and cylinder-based recordings in the archive for preservation and
access. Word of the project brought even more cylinders to the
Library.

The Federal Cylinder Project was established to arrange, catalog,
and transfer to preservation tape this priceless heritage of music.
In addition, the project made cassette-tape copies of the recordings
to return to the tribes of origin. This last activity exemplified
a central philosophical tenet of the Folk Archive and of many ethnographic
archives throughout the United State, that the documentary materials
ultimately belong to the communities of origin. For many years,
representatives of American Indian tribes have visited the American
Folklife Center to use the collections for their own programs of
cultural preservation and revitalization.

Since the Folklife Center’s establishment in 1976, the
Folk Archive has grown dramatically, both from the field documentation
initiatives undertaken by the center itself and from the acquisition
of major collections. By 1981, the archive was officially named
the Archive of Folk Culture to reflect the breadth of its collections.
In July 1999 Peggy A. Bulger succeeded Alan Jabbour as director
of the American Folklife Center. In October 1999, the center was
granted permanent authorization by the U.S. Congress. In 2002,
Michael Taft was appointed head of the Folk Archive.

Today, the archive contains more than 3 million items and is
truly the national folk archive of the United States. In keeping
with the multicultural character of American society and the international
scope of the Library of Congress, its holdings also encompass folklife
materials from around the world. Yet many items in this storehouse
of information are imperiled because of the fragile nature of sound
recordings. In urgent need of preservation are thousands of original
audio recordings made over the course of the twentieth century
by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and other
ethnographers, on wax cylinder, wire, aluminum disc, acetate, audiotape,
and videotape. Many, including those from the past several decades,
require immediate conservation treatment and copying to other formats.
Also in need of preservation are scores of photographs, drawings,
diagrams, maps, and field notes that complement and provide interpretive
information on the recordings.

In July 2000, a project proposed jointly by the American Folklife
Center in the Library of Congress and the Center for Folklife and
Cultural Heritage of the Smithsonian Institution was awarded a
grant for $750,000 to preserve the historic sound recordings housed
at the two institutions. The White House Millennium Council’s
preservation program Save America’s Treasures, in partnership
with the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic
Preservation, made the grant.

Among its several aims, the Save Our Sounds audio preservation
project, as it came to be called, serves as a model and is building
expertise at the American Folklife Center that can then be shared
with others. All ethnographic collections will have to face the
inevitable deterioration of their sound recordings, and all will
need standards and guidelines for preservation. If the last hundred
years have been a time of great accumulation of recorded sound,
then the twenty-first century promises to be a time of major preservation
of sound recordings to ensure that they remain accessible.

The American Folklife Center is a small agency with a very large
mission. The Library of Congress provides essential institutional
support, of course, but to extend its reach the center engages
in cooperative agreements with other public and private organizations,
such as those with the National Park Service for field documentation
projects and others with commercial firms for various print and
music recording publication projects. For example, the center has
a cooperative arrangement with the International Storytelling Foundation
of Jonesborough, Tennessee, to collect, preserve, and disseminate
information about storytelling. The center has likewise acquired
thousands of hours of audio and video recordings, photographs,
manuscripts, and publications from the National Storytelling Festival.
Through an innovative arrangement with the National Council for
the Traditional Arts, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, the center
is acquiring a vast collection of five thousand hours of recordings
from the National Folk Festival and other events.

In November 2000, the American Folklife Center launched the Veterans
History Project, which was authorized by Public Law 106-380. Approved
by President Bill Clinton on October 27, 2000, the Veterans History
Project is designed to collect and preserve the personal stories
of America’s war veterans and to make selections from these
stories available on the Internet. This immense project has been
undertaken with the cooperation and participation of many project
partners, including the military service organizations and numerous
individual volunteers, and is supported by a major grant from AARP.

Thus does the American Folklife Center find itself newly engaged
in its mission “to preserve and present American folklife” in
the new millennium, as it continues to fulfill the dream of the
Folk Archive’s first inspired collector, Robert W. Gordon,
who sought to gather together in a national archive all our songs
and stories, a great task he regarded as “a national project
with many workers.”

The American Folklife
Center is one of the world's foremost repositories of early
wax-cylinder field recordings documenting the music and lore
of Native American cultures, among them many recordings transferred
from the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology.
By the early 1970s it was clear that time was taking its toll
on the cylinders and preservation duplication was urgent. Renewed
interest on the part of American Indian tribes in their own
cultural heritage heightened the need to preserve and catalog
this extensive collection.

The American Folklife Center's Save our Sound
Project is preserving as digital files many thousands of endangered
audio recordings, made in different formats, from the 1890s
to the present.